This page explains the technologies that we use to provide the best web site ownership experience for our customers.
Our Data Center – Rackforce, Kelowna, B.C.
To provide our customers with world class hosting requires a world class data center. We have been with Rackforce since September, 2003 and have nothing but great things to say about this relationship. See for yourself, check out our web server availability statistics below.
“RackForce is one of North America’s fastest growing privately held Hosting Service Providers (HSP), providing wholesale server rentals to e-businesses, application providers and hosting re-sellers. RackForce owns and operates multiple state-of-the-art data centers in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. This strategic western North-American location gives RackForce customers the advantages of:
- Dual grid hydro electric power – Two power sources means no risk of grid failures or massive power outages as seen in California and on the east coast of Canada and US.
- Multiple gigabit backbone connections – Redundant carriers and ultrafast routing
- Very low earthquake/flood/storm risk – Extremely low risk of catastrophic loss of operations.”
Web Server Environment – CentOS Linux
We’ve been tweaking our server environment to give the best possible experience, for both our web site owners AND our visitors. Our web server uses the CentOS Linux operating system, a open source community branch of Red Hat. For those that would like detailed info on what programs are configured on our web server, see here.
“What began as a better way to build software–openness, transparency, collaboration–soon shifted the balance of power in an entire industry. Today Red Hat is the world’s most trusted provider of Linux and open source technology. The revolution of choice continues with CentOS Linux. “
Plesk Control Panel
We are currently using Plesk 9.5 for Linux as our control panel. This has been an extremely stable release of Plesk , with the advantage of improvements to the control panel interface. For a demo of the Plesk 9.x control panel, click here.
“Plesk 9.0 for Linux/Unix marks a major milestone in the development of the software. The Plesk Desktop feature is a significant enhancement to the user interface. In this new release, the interface is designed to be task oriented and fully customizable. This feature has been created to meet the needs of any hosting customer, from non-technical users to advanced technical users.
Plesk Desktop allows all clients to have their own desktops with a customizable set of essential tasks and statistics. Any part of the desktop can be hidden or removed completely from the interface to make it cleaner and easier to use …”
Dynamic Content for your Web Site – PHP/mySQL
These technologies mark the evolution for web sites to the next level. We offer a combination of PHP scripting language and mySQL databases to deliver un paralleled flexibility for your web site’s content. As opposed to ASP (Microsoft’s dynamic content offering), PHP and mySQL are open-source software and are included (for free) for use on your web site. This web site is a perfect example – both WordPress and Gallery are PHP/mySQL applications
“PHP (acronym for “Pre-Hypertext Preprocessor”) is a widely-used, Open Source, general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. By using PHP, we are able to call content (text, images, audio and video files, flash, etc.) from a database for insertion into a web page.”
Whether you’re new to database technology or an experienced developer or DBA, MySQL offers a comprehensive range of certified software, support, training and consulting to make you successful.”
“The MySQL® database has become the world’s most popular open source database because of its consistent fast performance, high reliability and ease of use. It’s used in more than 8 million installations ranging from large corporations to specialized embedded applications on every continent in the world. (Yes, even Antarctica!)
Not only is MySQL the world’s most popular open source database, it’s also become the database of choice for a new generation of applications built on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python.) MySQL runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX, Netware, giving you the kind of flexibility that puts you in control.
Create, Communicate, Collaborate – The Horde Project
The Horde Project’s IMP (internet Messaging Program) webmail application allows you to access your web site email, contacts and calendar from any computer, anywhere in the world.
The Horde Project is about creating high quality Open Source applications, based on PHP and the Horde Framework.
The guiding principles of the Horde Project are to create solid standards-based applications using intelligent object oriented design that, wherever possible, are designed to run on a wide range of platforms and backends.
There is great emphasis on making Horde as friendly to non-English speakers as possible. The Horde Framework currently supports many localization features such as unicode and right-to-left text and generous users have contributed many translations for the framework and applications.
Currently Horde Project boasts many applications, some already enterprise-ready and deployed in demanding environments, and some exciting new ones still in development.”
Analyze, Understand, Adapt – Web Site Statistics
Web site statistics are one of the most useful tools in understanding your web site visitors and adapting to your changing market trends. The Webalizer Tool converts your visitor logs into easy to read graphs. For an example, see the web site statistics for digitalsynergy.ca
“The Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.
It was written to solve several problems that I had with currently available analysis packages. A vast majority of them were written in Perl or some other scripting language, and took forever to run. Some were not free. Some even produced wrong results, or results that were not in a format I found very useful.
In order to get the stats I wanted, in a format that I liked, I wrote The Webalizer, and have made it available here, to anyone who wants it, for any purpose. Starting as a simple Perl script with limited capabilities, it has grown into a full featured, robust and fast analysis tool, being used by thousands of systems around the globe.”
Bradford L. Barrett – brad@mrunix.net
Enterprise Firewall Security – Fortigate
Digital Synergy subscribes to the best in firewall security provided by Fortiwall’s Fortigate Firewall appliance, another premium service option offered by Rackforce.
“Fortinet´s Series for Large Enterprises and Service providers, which includes the FortiGate-5000 Series, FortiGate-4000, FortiGate-3000 and FortiGate-3600 Antivirus Firewalls, delivers best-of-breed, network-based antivirus protection. They can provide real-time antivirus protection for email and Web traffic in conjunction with existing firewall, VPN and IDS systems, or can be deployed for full network protection services with a simple configuration change. These gigabit-capacity units are designed to meet the most stringent requirements for performance and reliability, and include redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fans to minimize single-point failures, and also support redundant fail-over with no interruption in service. The high capacity, reliability and easy management of units in this series make them natural choices for managed service offerings.”
Fail-Safe Backup Systems – Trivoli by IBM
Digital Synergy subscribes to RackForce’s premium backup service option to protect all of our customer’s website data and operating system environments. As well, we also offer backup utilities to our end users, both for your entire site and application database backup.
“Disaster recovery and critical data protection is an absolute must for serious professional server administrator/owners. An OS level, ‘DDS Backup’ solution is an available option with every DDS dedicated server. This type of backup “mirrors” your entire hosting environment and can restore a complete server configuration and not just certain directories like most other backup solutions. This level of data protection can significantly reduce the downtime and cost of data corruption or loss.”